Posted by Any marketing effort must be measurable to be successful. Whether it is consumer habits or market trends, you need to study and analyze them all the time and measure the results of your campaigns.
Regularly measuring and analyzing your marketing campaigns will give you an insight into their effectiveness. Armed with relevant data, you can ensure your efforts are paying off, and you generate a high ROI.
This post discusses some of the industry’s best practices along that line that you should use.
Identify the right metrics/KPIs that you can make your core focus area
Measuring the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns starts with selecting the right metrics or KPIs (key performance indicators).
To choose which metrics to track, you need to look at your marketing campaign goals and objectives. Those could be brand awareness, brand engagement, lead generation, traffic boost, sales increase, and anything else you need for growth.
You also need to have in mind the channels you use. Here are some of the most relevant metrics to track, depending on the channel and marketing objective.
Website metrics:
- Total visits
- New sessions
- Page-views
- Average time on page
- Bounce rate
- Total conversions
- Traffic by channel (organic search, paid search, direct, social, referral, email)
Search engine marketing metrics:
- CTR (click-through-rate)
- Conversion rate
- Impressions
- Quality score
- Average position
Social media marketing metrics:
- Audience growth rate
- Average engagement rate
- Visitor frequency rate
- Interaction (likes and shares)
- Brand mention
- Social conversions
Social media advertising metrics:
- Reach
- Frequency
- CPM (cost per mile) or CPVV (cost per valued view)
- Positive earned media
- VTR (view-through rate)
Email marketing metrics:
- CTR
- Conversion rate
- Bounce rate
- List growth rate
- Number of unsubscribes
- Email sharing/forwarding rate
- Revenue per email
- Overall ROI
Invest in the right tools to track site visitors
Your every marketing campaign comes down to one thing – driving quality traffic to your site so that you can convert all the leads you generate. So, the most important thing is to track site visitors, including their behaviour on-site and which channels they’re coming from.
Crowdfireapp is one of the most powerful social media management tools. Apart from enabling you to track, measure, and analyze various social metrics, it also comes with content, publishing, and brand mention features.
To analyze your email marketing campaign and organize all your customer service emails, you can give Getmailbird a try. It offers a wide range of features for running email campaigns and measuring their performance.
There are a plethora of analytics tools for each channel, but the best way to track and analyze all your campaign data is to consolidate it into a single hub.
One of the best tools you can utilize to achieve that is Google Analytics. It’s best for analyzing web and SEO metrics, but it features an abundance of comparison tools that enable you to measure various data across different platforms and devices.
The best part is you can integrate Google Analytics with almost any other tool you’re already using.
Use a conversion funnel and measure against site visitors
Using a conversion funnel to track your KPIs and site visitors is vital for identifying and resolving any potential issues with your campaign.
It helps you make proper adjustments that will enable you to attract the right kind of traffic, that is, qualified leads that convert.
Every website visitor takes certain steps before reaching the conversion stage. If you are to guide them towards the end of the funnel, you need to know what makes them bounce back and when, as well as what makes them stay and convert.
To optimize your conversion funnel, you need to look at your CPA (cost per acquisition), CLV (customer lifetime value), the conversion rate per channel, the conversion rate of each funnel section (top, middle, bottom – awareness, consideration, decision), and the duration of each marketing cycle.
Engage in demand forecasting
Demand forecasting is vital for estimating probable future demand for your products or services. It helps you reduce risks and adjust your marketing plans so that you can make more effective decisions that enable you to reach your goals.
By analyzing market trends and consumer behaviour to determine future demand, you can effectively optimize your marketing efforts to increase conversions and ROI.
There are many types of demand forecasting, but the most important for marketing campaigns are active, short-term, and medium to long-term demand forecasting.
Active forecasting is effective when your marketing efforts are focused on scaling and aggressive growth. The process usually covers a period of 6-12 months and is useful for tactical decisions.
Short-term forecasting is excellent for measuring the effectiveness of your tactical decisions. You carry it out for a period of 3-12 months, usually to detect patterns in seasonal demand.
Medium to long-term forecasting helps you make better strategic decisions, as it covers a period of 1-2 years.
There are also many quantitative and qualitative methods of demand forecasting, but the most vital technique to use is a time series analysis. It helps you analyze different values of different variables in specific time intervals to understand your marketing data better and make better decisions.
It helps you detect patterns in the data and uncover short-term, long-term, or seasonal trends.
Do competitor analysis to help with your strategic planning
Conducting competitor analysis is paramount for improving your campaign and standing out. By learning how your competitors are attracting and converting the right audience, you can enhance your efforts and gain a competitive advantage. You can refine your strategy and turn your weaknesses into strengths.
You can research their ads, the keywords and technology they’re using, and much more. But some of the best things to analyze are their social followers and backlinks.
How they are interacting with their social followers and what they are doing to engage and convert them will help you step up your game.
You should also tune into social mentions to see what their followers and customers are saying about them. You may learn about consumers’ needs they may not be addressing properly or at all, so you can jump in with your outstanding solutions.
Conducting a competitor backlink analysis will provide you with an insight into their authority and the sites and pages that are bringing them the most traffic. Then, you can reach out to those sites and create an effective blogger outreach campaign to further supercharge your marketing.
But what if your location prevents you from analyzing your competitors? What if there are geo-restrictions blocking you out? Don’t worry; there’s a perfect solution.
VPN software masks your real IP address, assigning you an IP address of one of its servers and virtually placing you in a different geographical location. As such, it allows you to bypass geo-restrictions and access any content and website you want, no matter where you are.
A VPN software solution is also great for keeping your sensitive data safe and secure. Cybersecurity is certainly one of your top concerns as a business owner, especially since cybercrime is on the rise. A VPN will encrypt your traffic and make you completely anonymous online, keeping all your personal and sensitive data away from prying eyes.
Measuring and analyzing your marketing campaign data is a long but essential process. If you don’t measure the results, you can’t know if your efforts are paying off. Failing to measure and analyze the results simply means shooting in the dark and hoping for the best, and that’s not a path to success.
So, don’t play a guessing game with your marketing strategy. Use these best practices to continually collect and analyze your marketing data. They will help you make the necessary adjustments as you go, optimize your every campaign, and start generating a lot more conversions and ROI.
This is a guest post by Dean Chester.
Dean Chester is a cybersecurity expert and the co-founder of research VPN providers Cooltechzone.Com. While cryptography has been and remains his main passion, he is also interested in the political and social repercussions of internet safety issues.
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